[wittynickname]

Originally Posted by CorsiHockeyLeague

It's unbelievably ####ing depressing that after all the discussion on this point you've still missed the issue entirely.

Caring about issues that affect you personally, and those you care about, has nothing to do with identity politics. It's the exact opposite, in fact - your concern is your ability to live your life and make your own choices. That is a quintessentially liberal concern.

The ability to take steps to reduce your environmental impact, because you care about the environment, is a choice you should get to make, obviously. More controversially, but still from the liberal standpoint, the choice to have an abortion is a matter of control over your body and your path in life, free of interference from government or those who don't know you but want to impose their values on you and force you to live a different life than the one you'd choose. That freedom is important to preserve and defend, not because you're a woman, but because you're a human being.

None of these things engage identity politics. None of it requires that you be thought of first by virtue of your gender, race, sexual orientation or anything else. It requires that you be thought of as a person, whose life should be theirs to control free of interference to the greatest degree manageable, to make your own decisions rather than having someone else make them for you. That is the entire point; it doesn't matter if you're gay or black or a woman or East Indian or bisexual, the only group identity that matters is homo sapiens.

When the GOP starts telling men that they can't have vasectomies, that masturbation is illegal (I mean, hey, those little guys are potential babies!), then I'll believe that this has nothing to do with one's identity as a woman. No one is trying to regulate when and how men can procreate. Only women. This is not a human right that they are attempting to infringe upon, it is a woman's right.

This is inherently based on one's biological sex, because people biologically born as men are incapable of giving birth, so it literally does not affect them.

When you are enacting laws that only affect certain identities, races, genders, religions, then you are specifically infringing based on their identities.

This also has nothing to do with identity politics, it's a matter of pure risk analysis, particularly downside risk. One is an existential threat, the other is a threat to quality of life for people. But it's irrelevant, because unfortunately, this is the real world, and we have to deal with both types of threats at once.

Both are existential threats for the people who are at risk.

Again, at this moment in time, some big terrifying world-altering problem caused by Trump is hypothetical. He may very well cause another world war, start a nuclear winter, etc. But he has not actually yet done those things.

At this moment in time, GOP lawmakers are actively threatening the rights of others, as well as actively fighting to reduce environmental protections. These things are currently happening.

Yes, we have to worry about Trump and the risks that he brings, but we also have to deal with the actual real things that are already happening. And again, the issue with this is that it does not matter one iota whether Trump remains President or not. If Trump is impeached, the existential threat to humanity is massively lessened, and that's fantastic.

But if Trump is impeached, government is still full of anti-science, hyper-religious conservatives who are still going to be ignoring climate change and attempting to infringe on the rights of women and the LGBT community, demonizing Muslims and undocumented immigrants and refugees, etc.

Trump is a very unique, but understandably huge, threat. But the rest of those threats remain whether he is President or not, so even if we can manage to rid ourselves of Trump, we still have these issues to worry about.